Datacentres: Create Collaborate and Interact

As centralized repositories, either physical or virtual, for storage,
management, and dissemination of data pertaining to business, a datacentre lies
at the heart of most organizations and their working. Employees, partners and
customers rely on data and resources in the datacenter to effectively create,
collaborate, and interact. Over the last decade, the rise of Internet and
web-based technologies has resulted in a greater focus on data and availability
of information at any place, anytime. Data generation in any business house at
any given point of time is stellar. To manage this data and maintain uptime 24x7
is a very crucial task. As businesses have gone global, a need for uninterrupted
support infrastructure has become critical and the concept of datacenters as
well as network operations center have taken wind. This coupled with the cost of
bandwidth, which has plummeted significantly, has dramatically fueled the growth
of datacenters. Every enterprise today needs some semblance of IT infrastructure
in place. Real-time access to data and communication is the lifeline of even the
smallest brick-and-mortar organization, and basic IT infrastructure has now
evolved into a mandatory business requirement. The premise that Internet
datacenters can provide immense benefit to customers from virtually all industry
verticals is now an established credo, making them a universally accepted
business need.

Business opportunity

Given the above, datacenters are growing in numbers as well as complexity, thus
providing a huge business opportunity for both the solutions providers as well
as vendors playing in the arena. The growth of the datacenter market in India as
well as across the globe is attributed to the move towards centralization and
consolidation at the business process level, business application level and
infrastructure level. Customers have realized that a diversified business has to
have its various units pulled together. So organizations believe that if they
can use a single application, a single instance of an application or a common
database, they will be able to maximize efficiencies and better satisfy the
needs of their employees or customers.

According to Prateek Garg, MD and CEO, Progressive Infotech, “Datacenter
consulting appears to be another big piece of opportunity. Going forward, this
could drive two opportunities in the future, one for remote monitoring and
management for datacenter infrastructure and applications, as also hosting of
these servers in third party datacenters.”

As regard the growth of datacenter business in India, there are broadly two
different reasons that have contributed to it. First is the transfer of global
or regional (like APAC region for example) datacenters of MNCs to India because
of the cost arbitrage reasons (manpower costs or real estate costs etc) as India
integrates with the global economy — part of the core IT infrastructure of
MNCs are also shifting to India. Secondly, the adaptation of information
technology — such ERP implementation is making Indian IT infrastructure grow
big enough to move to a datacenter setup.

Banking automation, new technology driven services like telecom are also driving
some big datacenters being established in India. Opportunities for system
integrators lie in the collocation of server, apart from shared server space,
and disaster recovery/backup solutions. Local system integration firms primarily
come into the picture at the design/planning stage of any IT infrastructure.

“To a SI or solution provider the datacenter as a business provides direct
access to the core of the customers IT set up and that can open up opportunities
of true partnership with the customer, rather than being just a supplier or a
vendor. This partnership can bring value to the customer in terms of quality and
cost of service as well as increased revenue opportunity for the solution
provider thus driving a win-win situation,” says Satyen Vyas, Director and
CEO, Vitage Group.

The other reason for the boom in datacenter business is the need for better
infrastructure especially with regard to disaster recovery solutions.” Either
because organizations want to expand their current infrastructure or because
they want to reduce uptime of their existing infrastructure, they are looking
for service providers like us. Such recent developments have also given rise to
third party vendor management of these setups, “ says Simon Robin, National
Sales Manager, Sify.

In essence therefore, consolidation seems to be the biggest driver for the
datacenter business globally. Also increased computing power and the need for
better accessibility of secure data across various locations has prompted the
need for efficient datacenter management. IMS appears to be one factor, which,
coupled with adequate connectivity infrastructure and availability of skills
acts as catalysts for furthering the growth of datacenters.

According to experts this business will see a rapid growth in next three years
and may surpass the growth rate of the traditional services like software
development and so on. The rapid growth of economy is driving the need of IT
infrastructure growth and that of business critical applications.

The integration to global economy is driving the need for 24x7 business
availability as a base requirement. This will continue to drive the growth of
NOC and datacenter business over the next decade. Undoubtedly, therefore
datacenter businesses would grow in the years to come. As far as India is
concerned this would be driven by the fact that Indian enterprises and their
employees have started impersonating the western culture of working from remote
locations and even from home. Datacenters will begin play an increasingly
important role in the such processes where accessing information anytime will
become critical.

Challenges of setting up

IT organizations today are working to improve operational efficiency, optimize
utilization of datacenter resources, and look for a resilient infrastructure
that consistently protects diverse applications and services against
disruptions. The ultimate goal for a datacenter manager is to ensure an agile
infrastructure that can incorporate ongoing improvements in computer, storage,
networking and application technologies, while empowering IT to support changing
business processes.

	“Datacenter consulting appears to be a big piece of opportunity. Going forward, this could drive two opportunities in the future, one for remote monitoring and management for datacenter infrastructure and applications, as also hosting of these servers in third party datacenters.”
Prateek Garg MD and CEO, Progressive Infotech
	“To a SI or solution provider the datacenter as a business provides direct access to the core of the customers IT set up and that can open up opportunities of true partnership with the customer, rather than being just a supplier or a vendor.”
Satyen Vyas Director and CEO, Vitage Group
	“With high density of data that requires to be managed, adequate supply of power along with the required amount of cooling is a key challenge for setting up datacenters”
Prabodh Tagare Marketing Manager, APC
	“We use NOC to provide T1/T2/T3 levels of services. We also provide Remote Monitoring Services using home grown tools like OmniMonitor, OmniAudit and OmniManageIT or industry standardtools as per customer's requirements.”
Atul Hemani Chairman and MD, Omnitech InfoSolutions
	“Our commitment to industry standards and the fact that our datacenters are open to multiple applications and can work on various operating systems ensures that our customers get a choice and flexibility to deploy relevant applications.”
Pallab Talukdar Director — Enterprise Marketing and Alliances, HP India

The scalability planning and ongoing technology changes have been the real
concerns while setting up datace­ntres. The biggest challenge while
establishing a datacenter is that this is a highly capital intensive business.
Making a good headway in datacenter domain is not everybody's cup of tea since
the entry barriers in terms of investment are of highest order. According to
Karan Kriplani, Senior Manager — Marketing, NetMagic Solutions, “The biggest
challenge that most companies face with their captive or enterprise datacenters
is maintaining the skilled staff and high infrastructure nee­ded for daily
data­center operations. Maximizing uptime and performance while establishing
sufficient redundancy and maintaining watertight security is an area of concern.”

Technology selection is also of paramount importance. The intended service
offerings should dictate the technology required, and not vice versa. It is also
a challenge to implement the requisite high levels of physical and electronic
security for online customers. Another challenge is ensuring that there is
absolutely zero technology obsolescence in the datacenter environment. “Data­centers
need to invest significantly in provisioning best-of-breed technologies for
their customers, and protect against the inevitable obsolescence as technology
progresses,” indicates Kriplani while adding that this is one reason why even
some of the largest enterprises in the world choose to host their
mission-critical and sensitive data with established third party vendors. By
doing so, he believes most security concerns can be met, since the latest
technology and resources are already in place.

“With high density of data that requires to be managed, adequate supply of
power along with the required amount of cooling is a key challenge,” says,
Prabodh Tagare, Marketing Manager, APC.

Customers concern about data security is by far the biggest challenge that
needs to addressed in this business and customers seem to be increasingly opting
for third party management of their data. This is an extension of the basic
outsourcing practice where many professional companies prefer to focus on their
core business and outsource the non-core functions to the service provider.
Remote datacenter management as against internal IT team not only improves speed
and quality of service but it also reduces the cost of service as the same
vendor also manages other customer's datacenter thus spreading the cost across
customers.

Since infrastructure is a one-time investment while services are required on
a continued basis, the challenge is to devise solutions around customer needs of
database manageability, security and service.

Fortunately there are several technologies available today that can impact
the efficiency and effectiveness of the datacenter as well as its availability
and resiliency. Consolidation and virtualization technologies deployed in
datacentre solutions enable IT organizations to turn computing and storage
resources from monolithic systems into a 'service-centric' shared pool of
resources with standardized components that can be dynamically aggregated,
tiered, provisioned, and accessed through an intelligent network.

The rapid emergence of 1U and blade servers, combined with various
standardizations help eliminate the need for one-time engineering and overhead
of dealing with unique problems in the infrastructure thus reducing unnecessary
expense and avoiding downtime.

Datacenter solutions - Provision and management

The availability of various technologies along with the growing business
opportunity has made it possible for several players to take a plunge into the
datacenter business and each one had evolved their own key strategy for managing
the same. As customers, many enterprises seem to adopt third-party solutions for
data management and other mission-critical IT.

Historically, banks and other financial institutions have always been
hesitant to adopt third-party services for managing their data, largely due to
the perceived threat to confidentiality. Today, however, well-known domestic and
international players in the BFSI segment are looking for third party solutions
for datacentre infrastructure and management since they get the benefit of
state-of-the-art security, and world-class in-house skill sets to manage online
applications. Customers also stand to benefit from extremely stringent Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) and Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).

Solution providers playing in the datacenter business arena have adopted
various strategies for deployment and managements of the solutions they provide
to the customer. According to Atul Hemani, Chairman and MD, Omnitech
InfoSolutions Ltd, “We Offer technology services to our global customers. We
use NOC to provide T1/T2/T3 levels of services. We also provide Remote
Monitoring Services using home grown tools like OmniMonitor, OmniAudit and
OmniManageIT or industry standard tools as per customer's requirements.”

Kriplani of NetMagic considers their model a-la-carte approach, where
customers can choose from the various services on offer. “Additionally our
customers benefit by outsourcing their requirements to us. Besides considerable
reduction in capital expenditure, customers who host with NetMagic also realize
a significant saving in their operational expenditure,” he added. NetMagic
solutions also include one-stop service provisioning, secure and scalable
solutions and services, access to best-of-breed technologies, skillets, and
infrastructure, provisioning of redundancy in infrastructure and service
provisioning, protection from obsolescence in technology, 24x7 monitoring,
management, support and clearly defined service level guarantees.

Kolkata's Diamond Infotech provides two kinds of datacenter solutions. One
where the customer wants to setup the datacenter in there own office and the
other where the customer wants his server or other equipments to be installed at
ISP datacenter. Diamond therefore provides for complete datacenter solutions
with both hardware and software as an integrated package. According to Manoj
Rathi, Director, Diamond Infotech, ”We are associated with vendors like APC
and Reliance for solution delivery.” According to Rathi, when a customer
invests more into a datacentre setup he prefers big players or MNCs to cater to
his solutions. However, he feels that in the future the kind of service would
matter more than the cost.

Solution providers apart, even vendors are looking to provide for the best of
datacentre solutions so as to ensure that customers getting a lower TCO and
greater resilience.

Commenting on the differentiating factors of their solution, Pallab Talukdar,
Director — Enterprise Marketing and Alliances, HP, said, ”In perspective we
offer the widest portfolio of building blocks for datacenters that encompass
industry standard servers, storage facilities, bleed infrastructure and an open
management facility to our customers. Our commitment to industry standards and
the fact that our datacenters are open to multiple applications and can work on
various operating systems ensures that our customers get a choice and
flexibility to deploy relevant applications. “ Agreeing with him on the need
for flexibility and lower costs, Tagare of APC opined that by working to provide
integrated architectures, APC ensures that customers not only get cost benefits
but also save on installation space required for datacentres.

As a company that is service driven and focused on data management, customers
of Sify, Robin believes stand to gain in terms of application, security and
connectivity at their datacentres. He feels that datacentre business in fact
compliments a lot of other businesses that Sify does as well.

According to a write up in 'Voice&Data', the Cisco Data Center Network
Architecture optimizes IT productivity and resource utilization by providing a
platform for the secure deployment of a service oriented, on-demand model for
compute, storage and network resources. It offers customers greater choice for
scale-up and scale-out server, storage consolidation and virtu­alization
strategies, resulting in lower capital costs and higher utilization. It allows
reduced operations costs by streamlining management and providing pooled
infrastructure resources to meet application needs.

The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture creates an environment to protect
valuable applications, services, information and infrastructure. It helps to
ensure regulatory compliance by providing a resilient network infrastructure
that supports security, availability, performance and business continuance
goals. By providing end-to-end segmentation across network, server and storage
environments, together with application delivery optimization services, SLAs are
improved at the same time that the benefits of consolidation are realized.

Additionally the Cisco Data Center Network Architecture includes a networked
infrastructure with gigabit/10gigabit ethernet, infiniband and fiber channel
switching on intelligent server farm, server fabric and storage networking
platforms and DWDM, SONET and SDH optical transport platforms; interactive
services encompassing storage fabric services, compute services, security
services, and application delivery and integration services and management
framework providing configuration, security, provisioning, change and fault
management services.

Datacenters and managed services

Datacenters are becoming an integral part of the growing managed services
business. IDC estimates that the datacenter market is slated to grow at a CAGR
of 53 percent from Rs 164.1 crore in 2000-2001 to Rs 1,394 crore in 2006. The
India market seems to differ from the other markets in terms of infrastructure
and service adoption. From an infrastructure standpoint, the US still is the
worldwide leader in connectivity as a result of the vast telecom legacy
infrastructure. But in the last few years the bandwidth proliferation in India
has seen quantum growth and this could easily change the scenario.

Significantly, the Indian datacenter industry offers some of the same
advantages that the Indian software and ITeS industries offer to their overseas
clients, such as an abundance of skilled labor, access to best of breed
technology and infrastructure, an English speaking workforce, and of course, the
labor arbitrage. The commercials for managed services and support are far lower
here than they are in the West, making India a popular hosting destination for
companies that cater to target audiences that might not even be geographically
Asia-centric.

Experts believe that since the fallout from the dot.com bust of 2001 and
after, there has been a great deal of consolidation within the data­center
space not just in India, but internationally as well. It stands to reason that
in the fallout of the dot.com 'bust', datacenters (both globally and
domestically) without adaptive capabilities were unable to either restructure or
realign their service and product offerings to adapt to modified market
requirements. It's this shakedown in the market that has caused some of the
erstwhile global heavyweights in the Indian datacenter market to shut shop.

According to Garg of Progressive Infotech, “Customers in India still
believe in a 'hot-body' coming to support them as the labor costs are still
affordable which is in stark contrast to developed economies like USA. However,
going forward this will change as for a country of our size to provide
consistent service 24x7 across all technologies and platforms this possibly will
be the only cost effective model, which will be less people dependent. From the
Indian context this opportunity is not huge today but is likely to become big.”

For Team Computers managed services implies providing onsite as well as
offsite support to the customer. “In the US, partners who are working as
managed service providers do remote management of customers data that involves
desktop, servers and infrastructure supervision, which covers 80-85 percent of
IT problems of an enterprise. Whereas, in India the scenarios are entirely poles
apart and if not 100 percent approximately 90 percent of the IT issues are taken
care of onsite only,” says Uttappa.

Competition and future scenario

With datacenters redefining their offerings, the future would all be about
ensuring that datacentres are well placed to offer more than plain-vanilla
hosting, and rudimentary infrastructure services, which have become something of
a commodity in today's markets. Competition is bound to grow and solutions
providers can always get an advantage of being there in terms of referrals,
proven processes and practices and ready infrastructure, to capitalize and get
the leading edge.

While managed service would grow, datacentre infrastructure provision will
also become critical and players in the filed would have to ensure low TCO and
greater efficiency to their customers.

As far as the Indian market is concerned most expert's feel that these
components still needs to mature and grow. This means that while growth
opportunities exist, not many players would join in. However, those who are in
the space of datacentre business need to capitalize on the existing opportunity.

Subbalakshmi BM With
inputs from Anjali Choudhary in Delhi, Nelson P Johny in Mumbai and Piyali Guha
in Kolkata